Topic: Obama

first published 2014; updated 2018; updated Aug. 2021.

Why I Burning my last bridge with Obama. Carey Wedler. Mar. 13, 2014.

Why I Burned My Obama Shirt. interview with Carey Wedler, via youtube. May 12, 2014.

Michelle Obama.. do me a favor, please! Nov. 7, 2013.

Obama Did NOT Kill Osama bin Laden. Paul Craig Roberts. Aug. 7, 2021.

The American People Live In a World of False Narratives

The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama. Matt Taibbi. Aug. 13, 2021.

On the road from stirring symbol of hope and change to the Fat Elvis of neoliberalism, birthday-partying Barack Obama sold us all out

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There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.

Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this, but they shouldn’t.

Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper class status they crave: us.

Obama did that. He sold us out, and it’s time to start talking about the role he played in bringing about the hopeless cynical mess that is modern America.

Why “Incremental Change” Is Worse Than No Change At All. CaitOz. July 15, 2019.

President Obama was elected on the platform of hope and change. He promised big, sweeping changes, and, at the end of eight years, had continued and expanded all the most depraved foreign and domestic policies of his predecessor while killing the push for universal healthcare and creating a climate initiative which was the equivalent of a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. He now defends his near-complete lack of progress by claiming that compromising with the plutocrats and achieving a small amount of change is better than not compromising and achieving no change at all.

The World According to Ben Rhodes: Hypocrisy in Obama’s Foreign Policy. As`ad AbuKhalil, Consortium News. July 23, 2018.

Ben Rhodes’ interesting new book, The World as It is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (Random House), should be widely read not because of the wisdom or moral message it contains but because it is an unintended, damning account of liberal imperialism.

The book suffers from an acute case of self-congratulation, sanctimoniousness and hubris. The author situates himself (along with Samantha Power and the young Foreign Service officers who worked in the Obama White House) among the liberal advocates of foreign policy. He does not include Obama in this group, and the latter comes across—despite perfunctory praise—as he really is: an unprincipled politician who unfailingly subordinates moral arguments to political calculations.

Obama Goes Full Clinton Foundation With Series Of $400,000 Wall Street Speeches. zero hedge. Sep. 18, 2017.

For a man who once criticized the Clinton Foundation for taking millions of dollars in 'donations' from Wall Street "Fat Cats," Obama seems to be in a rush to replicate the lucrative Clinton scam via his very own Obama Foundation. ... since leaving office in January, Obama has already collected millions in speaking fees from the same Wall Street banks that may have cost Hillary her shot at the White House. 

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Now all he needs to do is use his foundation to raise money for Hurricane Irma victims in Barbuda, use that money to hire his buddies to rebuild the island and then sit back and wait for the kickbacks to roll in... then the transition to the Clinton Foundation will be complete.

Obama’s Just the Enemy And Always Was. Ian Welsh. Sep 18, 2017.

Obama’s just an evil man. He has always been an evil man. He has spent his time since office hobknobbing with billionaires and getting rich off the very people he helped bail out as president, and whom he refused to prosecute despite their clear crimes. 

He’s just a bad man. He was never left wing in any sense, and he’d rather see vast amounts of cruelty than see any sort of socialist anywhere near power.

Ilhan Omar: Obama's just a prety face who got away with murder. NYPost. Mar. 8, 2019.

If Progressives Don’t Wake Up to How Awful Obama Was, Their Movement Will Fail. Caitlin Johnstone, Observer. May 2, 2017.

... the answer, of course, is America. That’s what America is now. The man who continued and expanded all of Bush’s most evil policies, created a failed state in Libya, exponentially expanded the civilian-slaughtering US drone program which Chomsky calls “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” to unprecedented levels, facilitated the Orwellian expansion of the US surveillance state while prosecuting more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined, and used charm and public sympathy to evade the drastic environmental policy changes we’ll need to avert climate disaster and lull the progressive movement into a dead sleep for eight years now gets paid nearly half a million dollars an hour to continue bolstering the exploitative corporatist nightmare he’s dedicated his life to. 

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I can understand why pro-establishment liberals are defending this man; he stands for everything they stand for. If all you stand for is vapid tribalism and vanity politics and you are willing to sacrifice integrity along with economic and social justice and the lives of other people’s kids in corporatist wars overseas in order to feel like you’re on the right team, Obama is your man. But if you’re an actual, real progressive and not just a latte-sipping NPR listener with a sense of self-righteousness and a pro-choice bumper sticker, you’ve got no business regarding Obama with anything but disgust.

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When you’re dealing with a government that in 2013 gave itself the legal right to use media psy-ops on its own citizens, you can’t afford to have any stray strands of sympathy laying around out there. The war we’re fighting against the oligarchy is first and foremost a media war, and we may be certain that any sympathies progressives maintain toward their establishment oppressors will be exploited. By letting ourselves really see Obama for the vicious ecocidal warmongering corporatist that he is and letting the resulting disgust wash through us, we are inoculating ourselves against sympathy for him and everyone like him. That disgust will serve as a kind of psychological gag reflex that rescues us from swallowing any more of their bullshit.

Obama Starts to Cash In. Ian Welsh. Mar. 1, 2017.

This is why I don’t get very worked up about Trump’s conflicts of interest. They are real, but the only difference is that he’s getting paid now as opposed to later. Politicians exist to do what rich people want, Trump is only cutting out the middle man and the partial delay. 

This is an important point, and I want to encourage you to read this longer article on how politicians are paid by rich people to fuck over ordinary people. It’s not about donations for elections. 

Obama continued the trend, which has gotten worse for decades, of the rich getting more and more of all the gains of the economy. He did not try, in any way, to reverse it. And that’s because he knew he was being paid to funnel money to the rich. That was his job, he did it, and now he is getting his reward.

Obama’s Department of Justice’s Prime Job Is to Immunize Rich Wrongdoers. Ian Welsh. Oct. 8, 2016.

This is deliberate government policy and, yes, it comes from the top, from Obama. 

Obama and his DOJ engage in what should be considered routine criminal behavior, as far as I’m concerned: Helping criminals get away with their actions is itself criminal and that’s even before we talk about his actions in Libya, and so on. 

Scum. Absolute scum. People die when lifesaving drugs are raised to high prices. This is is immunizing negligent homicide. 

I want to be real clear, corporate criminals generally do more actual harm than the worst serial killer. 

Meanwhile, “liberals” act like Obama’s the greatest president ever, even though he left the US economy far worse for most Americans, was a warmonger, and engaged in the largest immunization of corporate crime in at least 90 years. 

He talks pretty but the man is scum. Scum to the bone. He took Bush’s America and regularized most of it and made some parts worse: kicking out more Hispanics, being far worse on whistleblowers, continuing to sign continuations of the AUMF and so on. 

That Obama is scum does not mean, for the less bright, or more partisan, that he is not better than certain alternatives. Beelzebub being the lesser evil to Satan doesn’t mean you want to sup with him. 

Scum.

I Am So Happy About Gay Marriage Being Legal in the US. Ian Welsh. Jun 26, 2015.

Obama, as a rule, is happy to give you things that the oligarchy doesn’t mind. They don’t, overall, mind gay rights. A large chunk of the oligarchy wanted Obamacare (it was and is a huge subsidy to insurance and pharma companies, among others). There is a reason the public option was never seriously considered by Obama; it was a potential threat to insurance companies. 

None of this is to say Obama is all bad, he certainly isn’t. But he is not your friend if you want widespread economic prosperity, and he never has been. Nor will he ever be. Nor, to point out what should be obvious, is Hilary Clinton (also not always for marriage equality). 

You set yourself up for immense hurt when you trust the wrong people with political power and it is important not to engage in revisionism about what is, after all, very recent history.

The Obamacare Fiasco. Ian Welsh. Nov 14, 2013.

When you are dealing with bad people, you must assume bad faith; bad behavior. You must plan for it. The best option was always Medicare-for-all (and I was told by at least one House staffer that they could pass it if they really wanted to and were willing to go nuclear.) The problem with Obama has always been this sickening need to be one of the boys. He appears to genuinely like and genuinely admire the people who have “made it” in this society—people like Jamie Dimon and the people who run insurance and drug companies. He thinks you can make deals with these people, and make sure everyone wins. 

You can’t. These people are the most successful parasites ever produced by our nasty form of sociopathic capitalism. You can only give them what they want or you can rip them from the body politic, so they stop sucking the blood from the host they’re killing. 

So the insurance companies have bitten the hand that fed them. Obama gave them everything they wanted and made sure nothing of importance they didn’t want (like a public option) was in the bill. Now they’re chomping and chewing, destroying what remains of his presidency. 

He has reaped as he sowed.

If you’re pro-Obama you’re an idiot, on the payroll, or evil. Ian Welsh. Aug. 4, 2011.

Look folks, at this point, Obama has made possible what a Republican president like McCain couldn’t do. What a Republican president like Bush failed to do: he is gutting social security and Medicare. 

Americans would have been better off with McCain because the Democratic party would not have allowed what just happened, and the GOP would have just passed McCain’s debt limit increase. 

This doesn’t mean the next Republican president won’t be worse than Obama, he probably will. But he will be worse in large part because of Obama, because Obama has institutionalized Bush’s constitutional order and taken it even further, in creating the so-called Super Congress to end run the democratic process. He will be worse because Obama, by legitimizing “deficits are evil” and delegitimizing civilian Keynesian stimulus (by screwing it up, which I predicted the day he announced his botched stimulus bill) he has made the only possible Keynesian stimulus a military one. At some point President Teabag will realize that the only thing which will provide enough help to the economy to get him reelected is a new, even bigger war.

Obama isn’t about compromise. Ian Welsh. Dec. 3, 2010.

People, Obama is not and never has been a left winger. Nor is he a Nixonian or Eisenhower Republican, that would put him massively to the left of where he is and to the left of the majority of the Democratic party. Instead his a Reaganite, something he told people repeatedly. 

Until folks get it through their skulls that Obama is not and never was a liberal, a progressive or left wing in any way, shape or form they are going to continue misdiagnosing the problem. That isn’t to say Obama may or may not be a wimp, but he always compromises right, never left and his compromises are minor. He always wanted tax cuts. He gave away the public option in private negotiations near the beginning of the HCR fight, not the end. He never even proposed an adequate stimulus bill. He bent arms, hard, to get TARP through. 

He’s a Reaganite. It’s what he believes in, genuinely. 

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Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise”, this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security.

Obama's Whitewash. Arthur Silber, Power of Narrative. March 19, 2008.

Obama states: "I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy." What Obama has "condemned, in unequivocal terms" is the truth -- the truth that is forbidden by the fictions that feed the myth of American exceptionalism. Obama has fully embraced the lies at the heart of mythologized America -- an embrace that is underscored by his inclusion of this phrase: "a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam." In this manner, Obama confirms that he will continue our policy of global interventionism including our endless interventions in the Middle East, which have been unceasing ever since World War I. Obama embraces all the lies that support that policy, and he will challenge none of them. (See "Songs of Death" for many more details concerning Obama's embrace of this murderous policy.) 

Almost every politician lies, and most politicians lie repeatedly. Yet in one sense, Obama's speech is exceptional, rare and unique -- but not for any of the reasons offered by Obama's uncritical, mindless adulators. It is exceptional for this reason: it is rare that a candidate will announce in such stark, comprehensive terms that he will lie about every fact of moment, about every aspect of our history that affects the crises of today and that has led to them, about everything that might challenge the mythological view of America. But that is what Obama achieved with this speech. It may be a remarkable achievement -- a remarkable and detestable one, and one that promises endless destruction in the future, both here and abroad. 

Is that what many Americans want? Tragically, the answer appears to be yes. Truth must be destroyed, no matter how many lives and how much suffering are required. Americans will accept anything else -- war, genocide, economic collapse, further terrorist attacks in the U.S. -- but the truth must be denied.

8 ways Obama sucks on climate. Ben Adler, grist. Feb 17, 2015.

The new conventional wisdom among the political class is that President Obama is doing everything he can without the cooperation of Congress to fight climate change. His administration set higher fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks. It has proposed the first-ever regulations on carbon emissions from power plants, and on methane leakage from oil and gas wells and pipelines. He got China on board with a plan to limit emissions, potentially paving the way for an international climate agreement later this year in Paris. Obama feeds this perception with his public statements, such as emphasizing the importance of climate change in his State of the Union address and musing to Vox.com about how the media fails to cover climate change with the urgency of other national security threats. But many of the administration’s moves, including a string of recent actions by federal agencies under Obama’s control, show this conventional wisdom to be false.

Why “Incremental Change” Is Worse Than No Change At All. CaitOz. July 15, 2019.

Another reason why the so-called “centrists” pose such a grave threat to our world is because their platform of slow, moderate, incremental change is actually worse than no change at all.

President Obama was elected on the platform of hope and change. He promised big, sweeping changes, and, at the end of eight years, had continued and expanded all the most depraved foreign and domestic policies of his predecessor while killing the push for universal healthcare and creating a climate initiative which was the equivalent of a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. He now defends his near-complete lack of progress by claiming that compromising with the plutocrats and achieving a small amount of change is better than not compromising and achieving no change at all.

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In both the Obama and the Trump administrations, voters ordered a box of hope and change, received a package labeled “slow, incremental change”, then opened it up and found no meaningful change whatsoever.

This pattern has been repeating for years.

The Absurdity of U.S. "Democracy"

The Democratic Party’s Campaign to Re-Elect President Trump. Paul Street, counterpunch. Jan. 3, 2020.

Anyone who hoped that the terrible experience of a neofascistic presidency might jolt the Democratic Party media and politics establishment into embracing the basic lesson of the 2016 election – that running a dismal, dollar-drenched centrist well to the right of the citizenry for president just guarantees right-wing control of the United States’ executive branch – is certain to be disappointed.

In the 2020 election cycle as in the last one, the establishment corporate neo-“liberal” Democrats and their many media outlets have alternately disdained, disregarded, and downplayed Bernie Sanders’ progressive-populist neo-New Deal campaign. It has been routine on “liberal” cable news (CNN and MSNBC) and on “P”BS to see the Democratic presidential contest discussed as if Sanders was just another marginal player. When he isn’t largely or (in some cases) completely ignored, the mildly social-democratish Sanders is absurdly discussed as some kind of wildly radical and therefore inherently un-electable leftist because he advances basic liberal-left programs that most Americans, unmentionably, support – Single Payer health insurance, green jobs programs, re-legalized union organizing, seriously progressive taxation, a doubling of the federal minimum wage, and free public college.

If one follows the lead of nearly every liberal pundit and talking head in U.S. corporate media, Democrats who are serious about defeating the demented and unmentionably fascistic oligarch Donald Trump are supposed to shun Sanders’ campaign against corporate plutocracy and rally behind neoliberal center-right Wall Street tools like Pete Butiggieg and the ridiculous right-wing buffoon, racist, and dementia-victim Joe Biden. Even mildly liberal Elizabeth “capitalist in my bones” Warren is considered “too left-wing” by much of the neo-McCarthyite/-“liberal” media-politics elite – this because she partially aligns herself with Medicare-for-All and says she wants to break up some of the obscenely gargantuan tech monopolies.

Nothing the ludicrous conservative “front-runner” Biden does or says past or present seems to properly disqualify him from serious presidential consideration in the “mainstream” Democratic consent manufactory. The list of things for which Rusty Chain-Brain Joe gets a free pass for is long. It’s down Orwell’s memory hole with: two horrific and laughably poor performances in previous presidential bids (1987-88 and 2007-08) even before his brains started coming out of his ears; plagiarism scandals in law school and during his first presidential run; a long Senate record of supine service to finance capital and corporate America; beating up on the sexual harassment victim Anita Hill during the confirmation of the right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; voting to authorize George W. Bush to arch-criminally and mass-murderously invade Iraq; calling Barack Obama “clean” and “articulate” in 2007.

In the current election cycle, Biden has repeatedly lost his train of thought and spoken jumbled absurdities on stage.  In response to a question about his extreme commitment to bipartisan alliance with Republicans, he idiotically invaded MSNBC talking head Joy Reid’s space and charged her with wanting “a physical revolution.”

2020 presidential candidate Biden has had to be restrained from inappropriately touching and sniffing women and children. He has justified past collaboration “across the [U.S. Senate] aisle” with racist white segregationist senators from the South (who happened to be Democrats) by saying that one of those senators “never called me boy.”  He has bragged that he would have beaten up Trump “in high school.” He has in all seriousness told a comically bizarre story to Black children about how he once faced down a Black youth named “Corn Pop” with a “rusty chain” in a parking lot outside a Black swimming pool where he once worked as a lifeguard (adding that I like it when kids sit on my lap”).  He advocated phonographs as a solution to Black poverty in a candidate debate.

In response to an elderly Iowa voter’s recent question about the propriety of Hunter Biden’s past position with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, Uncle Joe called the man (a Warren supporter) “fat” and “too old to vote for me.”

As if his recurrent claims that Single Payer health insurance is too expensive for U.S. government and taxpayers (it is no such thing) and his statement that people who want a Green New Deal to help save livable ecology should vote for somebody other than him haven’t made it sufficiently clear that Biden is a deeply conservative pawn of the corporate and financial establishment, Biden recently told an Iowa town hall that he would consider a Republican as his running mate. “The fact that Joe Biden is still running on a theme of illusory bipartisanship after the last four decades of scorched earth Republican politics — and after the Obama-Biden administration was repeatedly kicked in the teeth by Mitch McConnell’s gang – demonstrates,” Salon founder David Talbot recently commented on “social” media, “to some that Biden is just plain dense. But it’s more than that: Biden represents the across-the-aisle merger of corporate politics in America. There really are issues where Biden can work together with McConnell — like further enriching the billionaire class through tax cuts, government subsidies, global trade deals, etc. Bernie represents the Democratic Party at its New Deal/New Frontier best.  Biden represents the party’s worst, venal instincts.”

I am less enamored than Talbot with the New Deal and especially with the New Frontier (and with the Democratic Party and electoral politics in general), that’s a good take on Biden’s oligarchic essence.

Despite the blackout and smearing of Sanders by the “liberal” media, the New York Times and Politico have recently felt compelled to publish major stories conceding that Sanders could win the Democratic nomination.  Bernie’s base, it turns out, is remarkably steadfast and dedicated, strongly allegiant to his progressive-populist rhetoric and agenda.  The Times’ piece is titled: “Why Bernie Sanders Is Tough to Beat.” Politico’s report is titled “Democratic Insiders: Bernie Could Win the Nomination.”

Sanders’ staffers and volunteers are certainly burnishing these reports on their clipboards in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. But the aim of these articles is not to give Sanders more momentum. As Norman Solomon observes, the real goal it to alert conservative Democrats, funders, and media about the urgent need to escalate their attacks on Sanders:

“…the shift in media narratives about the Bernie campaign’s chances will surely boost the decibels of alarm bells in elite circles where dousing the fires of progressive populism is a top priority…For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of disparaging and minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn’t work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore attacks.

Along the way, the corporate media will occasionally give voice to some Sanders defenders and supporters. A few establishment Democrats will decide to make nice with him early in the year. But the overwhelming bulk of Sanders media coverage — synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party — will range from condescending to savage.

When the Bernie campaign wasn’t being ignored by corporate media during 2019, innuendos and mud often flew in his direction. But we ain’t seen nothing yet.

With so much at stake — including the presidency and the top leadership of the Democratic Party — no holds will be barred. For the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it’ll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign.”

So what if the progressive-populist Sanders is the Democrats’ best shot to mobilize the poor and working-class constituencies who need to be rallied if the faux-populist neofascist Trump is going to be defeated next November?  As I have noted on numerous prior occasions here and elsewhere, the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats and their many media allies are not primarily about winning elections, much less about social justice, democracy, and environmental sanity.  They are primarily about serving wealthy sponsors and entering the corporate and financial oligarchy.  They and their elite backers would rather lose to the right, even to an apocalyptic and neofascist right, than lose to the left, even a mildly progressive left, in their own party.  They are going to pull out all the stops they can to try to out the reactionary and demented clown Joe Biden, with perhaps a Republican – how about de facto McCain-Romney Republicans like Pete Butiggieg or Amy Klobuchar?  – as his running mate atop the neoliberal campaign to re-elect Trump.

Not that Trump would leave peacefully if Sanders or perhaps even if Biden bested him in the nation’s anti-democratic Electoral College.  As the conservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein recently observed, Trump will “do anything” to stay in office. “Suspension of the election, negation of the results, declaration of martial law are not simply fanciful, alarmist, or crazy things to contemplate.  Members of Congress, governors and state legislators, leaders in civil society, lawyers, law enforcement figures and the military need to be thinking about how they might respond.”

The senior Trump administration official “Anonymous” concurs.  He cites a big “worry for our republic…what may happen if Trump is removed from office – by impeachment or a narrow defeat in the ballot box…Trump will not exit quietly – or easily.  It is why at many turns he suggests ‘coups’ are afoot and a ‘civil war’ is in the offing.  He is already seeding the narrative for his followers – a narrative that could end tragically.”

We can drop our “inverted totalitarian” obsession with (and depression by) savagely time-staggered big money-media-major party-candidate-centered electoral extravaganzas and take to the streets (like masses people fighting corrupt and tyrannical regimes around the world these days) now, while it might prevent a U.S. version of bona fide fascism, or one year from now,  when it may be too late.

The Pearl

America’s Two-Headed One Party System. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 14, 2019.

There’s a scene from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl that’s been coming back to me over and over again ever since I started writing about US politics. I find it amazing that this scene hasn’t become a political meme yet, given Steinbeck’s fame and given its perfect illustration of the fake two-party system that we see in western so-called democracies.

The Pearl is a short novel about a poor fisherman, Kino, who discovers the titular enormous gem in an oyster and goes to sell it to the pearl buyers in town. What he doesn’t know is that the buyers, while they have multiple offices and pretend to compete with each other, all actually work for the same owner.

“Kino has found the Pearl of the World,” Steinbeck writes. “In the town, in little offices, sat the men who bought pearls from the fishers. They waited in their chairs until the pearls came in, and then they cackled and fought and shouted and threatened until they reached the lowest price the fisherman would stand.”

“And when the buying was over, these buyers sat alone and their fingers played restlessly with the pearls, and they wished they owned the pearls. For there were not many buyers really – there was only one, and he kept these agents in separate offices to give a semblance of competition.”

When Kino brings the priceless pearl to the sellers, they put on a performance, working together to deceive him into thinking it has no value in order to cheat him out of it for a ridiculously low price.

The man behind the desk said: “I have put a value on this pearl. The owner here does not think it fair. I will ask you to examine this – this thing and make an offer. Notice,” he said to Kino, “I have not mentioned what I have offered.”

The first dealer, dry and stringy, seemed now to see the pearl for the first time. He took it up, rolled it quickly between thumb and forefinger, and then cast it contemptuously back into the tray.

“Do not include me in the discussion,” he said dryly. “I will make no offer at all. I do not want it. This is not a pearl – it is a monstrosity.” His thin lips curled.

Now the second dealer, a little man with a shy soft voice, took up the pearl, and he examined it carefully. He took a glass from his pocket and inspected it under magnification. Then he laughed softly.

“Better pearls are made of paste,” he said. “I know these things. This is soft and chalky, it will lose its color and die in a few months. Look-” He offered the glass to Kino, showed him how to use it, and Kino, who had never seen a pearl’s surface magnified, was shocked at the strange-looking surface.

The third dealer took the pearl from Kino’s hands. “One of my clients likes such things,” he said. “I will offer five hundred pesos, and perhaps I can sell it to my client for six hundred.”

Kino reached quickly and snatched the pearl from his hand. He wrapped it in the deerskin and thrust it inside his shirt. The man behind the desk said, “I’m a fool, I know, but my first offer stands. I still offer one thousand. What are you doing?” he asked, as Kino thrust the pearl out of sight.

“I am cheated,” Kino cried fiercely. “My pearl is not for sale here. I will go, perhaps even to the capital.”

Now the dealers glanced quickly at one another. They knew they had played too hard; they knew they would be disciplined for their failure, and the man at the desk said quickly, “I might go to fifteen hundred.”

This is exactly how the two-headed one-party system works, in America and elsewhere. One party owned by one imperialist oligarchic class is placed in two separate offices “to give some semblance of competition,” just like Steinbeck’s pearl buyers. And just like Steinbeck’s pearl buyers they work together to deceive the people into accepting the lowest possible bid, in their case meaning the acceptance of virtually no change at all from the imperialist oligarchic status quo.

You see this kleptocratic dynamic at play regardless of who is in office. When the two-headed one-party system convinced Americans to sell their pearl to Barack Obama, for example, their payment took the form of a corporatist healthcare scam deceitfully labeled the Affordable Care Act and a pathetic temporary band-aid on the sucking chest wound of environmental peril, along with a continuation and expansion of all of Bush’s most depraved foreign and domestic policies.

Then Kino, angry and determined never again to be deceived, sold his pearl to the Republican Party. This time his payment consisted of a tax break for the wealthy and some verbiage about a wall, along with a continuation and expansion of all of Obama’s most depraved foreign and domestic policies.

This pattern repeats over and over and over again, whether it’s the presidency or Congress, and the people never learn their lesson. They’re trained to think of the two parties as competing, when really they’re more like the left fist and the right fist on the same boxer. An orthodox-stance boxer uses the left jab and the right cross in conjunction with each other in one-two punch combinations to accomplish the same goal, namely to leave his opponent staring up at the arena lights and rethinking his life decisions. And in this case, the boxer’s opponent is you.

Ralph Nader, who to this day is still falsely smeared as responsible for George W Bush’s pseudo-victory over Al Gore in 2000, occasionally shares an anecdote about the time he told his father that what America needs is a good third party.

“I’ll settle for a second,” his father replied.

This is the kind of clear seeing we all need to have. We need to not fall into the drama of the two-handed puppet show and mistake what we are seeing for two separate and competing entities. We need to see and be aware of the puppeteer at all times.

Look past the “semblance of competition” and watch what the pearl buyers are actually doing.

Ignore their words.

Ignore their fake pro-wrestling kayfabe combat over impeachment agendas they know will never bear fruit and their Russia conspiracies they know are pure nonsense.

Watch their actual behaviors instead.

Don’t fall for the illusion.

Don’t get sucked into the drama of the two-handed puppet show.

Don’t be deceived, Kino.

Don’t sell your pearl.

E-Day

The End of Trudeaumania. Luke Savage, Jacobin. Oct. 21, 2019.

Justin Trudeau may be decisively rejected in today’s Canadian election. The race has been shaken up by a surge in support for Jagmeet Singh and his social-democratic NDP, whose left-wing program is what many Canadians thought they were getting when they voted for Trudeau four years ago.

In 2015, the Liberals gained millions of votes on the basis of Trudeau’s personal popularity and a platform many mistakenly believed was a blueprint for transformative change. Predictably enough, Trudeau soon frustrated these hopes with a run of broken promises and a refusal to implement many parts of the ultimately modest agenda he had once campaigned on.

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As the Liberals governed from the technocratic center, the Trudeau brand carried on as usual, creating an ever-widening disjuncture between the government’s meticulously crafted political artifice and reality. When it emerged several weeks ago that the same prime minister who had built a cloying international image as the standard-bearer for inclusive liberalism had done blackface more times than he could count, the symbolism could hardly be missed.

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In essence, the NDP’s pitch is a more tangible and cogent version of what many voters — particularly the young — mistakenly believed they were going to get with Trudeau in 2015. 

What Canada Can Teach Us About Liberals Everywhere. Luke Savage, Current Affairs. Oct. 16, 2019.

What all this means is that Canadian federal governments have comparatively few obstacles to passing transformative legislation, if indeed it’s their intention. Except in extreme cases, a prime minister with a majority in the House probably won’t face a backbench rebellion and isn’t going to run afoul of big donor money in the event they push legislation private interests dislike. Public opinion, of course, might be an obstacle: Governments aren’t generally prone to pursuing policies that are wildly unpopular. But majority public opinion in Canada appears predisposed to supporting big new social programs and higher taxes on the rich (recent polling, for example, has found that more than two-thirds of Canadians support a wealth tax and a big majority support the creation of a national universal prescription drug program).

For even more evidence of this, we need to look no further than Justin Trudeau’s own campaign messaging in 2015—which gestured, rhetorically at least, towards an activist and equality-minded style of governance. In office, however, Trudeau has largely governed from the neoliberal center: paying lip service to the problems and injustices facing Canadian society while doing little if anything to meaningfully alleviate them and, in some cases, actively moving things in the opposite direction. Unlike its predecessor, his administration has been willing to acknowledge the threat of climate change, but nonetheless remains fiercely committed to the construction of new oil pipelines. For the first time in Canadian history, it has tabled a poverty reduction strategy, a document which in practice amounts to nothing more than a series of new metrics for measuring poverty and includes no resources for actually reducing it. In a cynical sleight of hand, its signature tax hike on the rich was neatly paired with a tax cut for the slightly less rich. Having promised to reform Canada’s archaic electoral system, it reversed course midstream and denounced the very efforts it had sworn to take up as risky and dangerous.

Despite four years of a Liberal government in office preaching the rhetoric of progressive reform, little about Canadian society has fundamentally changed and there’s every reason to believe things will stay that way if the government is re-elected with another majority. And yet, members of the Canadian left can probably expect all the familiar sermons to be repeated when they inevitably protest. Despite the relative lack of obstacles they face compared to America’s Democrats, Canada’s liberals have long been masterfully dextrous when it comes to lecturing progressively-minded voters about the need for “pragmatism” and the necessity of never breaking too much with the status quo, even as they rhetorically acknowledge its injustices.

The Election and the Climate Crisis: A Tyee Reader. The Tyee. Oct. 16, 2019.

Topic: Russiagate B.S.

The Strangelovian Russia-gate Myth. Phil Rockstroh, Consortium News. Dec. 22, 2017.

The effects of humankind created climate chaos are proving to be more devastating than even the grimmest predictions. Today’s wealth inequity is worse than in the Gilded Age. Around the world, the U.S. empire wages perpetual war, hot and cold, overt and covert, including military brinksmanship with the nuclear power, the Russian Federation. 

Speaking of the latter, the U.S. media retails a storyline that would be considered risible if it was not so dangerously inflammatory i.e., L’affaire du Russia-gate, wherein, according to the lurid tale, the sinister Vladimir Putin, applying techniques from the Russian handbook for international intrigue, Rasputin Mind Control For Dummies, has wrested control of the U.S. Executive Branch of government and bends its policies to his diabolical will. 

Ridiculous, huh? Yet the mainstream press promulgates and a large section of the general public believes what is clearly a reality-bereft tale, as all the while, ignoring circumstances crucial for their own economic well-being; their safety, insofar as a catastrophic nuclear exchange; and the steps required to maintain the ecological criteria crucial for allowing the continued viability of human beings on planet earth. 

A socio-cultural-political structure is in place wherein the individual is bombarded, to the point of psychical saturation, with self-serving, elitist manufactured media content.

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Hyperbolic? Take at perusal at the cover story of the Washington Establishment mouthpiece Newsweek, headlined: “PUTIN IS PREPARING FOR WORLD WAR III — IS TRUMP?” 

A sphincter-clinching tale of woe and warning promulgated by the same governmental entities and their corporate media stenographers who waxed apocalyptic about Iraq possessing weapon’s of mass destruction; that an immediate NATO bombing campaign must be launched against the government of Muammar Gaddafi or else a mass slaughter of the innocent would be imminent; and regime change in Syria must proceed because Assad is gassing his own people. 

Just what sort of an embittered cynic would call into question the credibility of and mistrust the motives of such paragons of probity? Yet, somehow, in regard to Russia-gate, liberals display scant-to-zip skepticism towards the stories peddled by this unelected, unaccountable clutch of hyper-authoritarian prevaricators.

Did the FBI Conspire to Stop Trump? Patrick Buchanan. Dec. 26, 2016.

Clinton's Defeat and the Fake News Conspiracy. Jonathan Cook, Counterpunch. Dec. 19, 2016.

There is an astounding double standard being applied to the US presidential election result. 

A few weeks ago the corporate media were appalled that Donald Trump demurred on whether he would accept the vote if it went against him. It was proof of his anti-democratic, authoritarian instincts. 

But now he has won, the same media outlets are cheerleading the establishment’s full-frontal assault on the legitimacy of a Trump presidency. That campaign is being headed by the failed candidate, Hillary Clinton, after a lengthy softening-up operation by US intelligence agencies, led by the CIA. 

According to the prevailing claim, Russian president Vladimir Putin stole the election on behalf of Trump (apparently by resorting to the US playbook on psy-ops). Trump is not truly a US president, it seems. He’s Russia’s placeman in the White House – a Moscovian candidate. 

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The Washington Post quoted CIA director John Brennan saying: “Earlier this week, I met separately with [the FBI’s] James Comey and [director of national intelligence] Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election.” 

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador turned whistleblower on British government collusion in torture, has said he personally received the leaked emails on behalf of Wikileaks. The data came, he said, not from Russian security agencies, or even from freelance Russian hackers, but from a disillusioned Democratic party insider. Russia experts in the US have similarly discounted the anti-Putin claims, as have former US intelligence agents. 

But either way, what is being overlooked in the furore is that none of the information that has come to light about the Democratic party was false. (Though the US intelligence services did indeed try to make that claim initially). The emails are real and provide an accurate account of the Democratic party’s anti-democratic machinations, including efforts to undermine the campaign of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s challenger. 

If Russia did indeed seek to influence the election by releasing truthful information that made Clinton and her allies look bad that would be far more legitimate interference than the US has engaged in against countless countries around the globe. For decades the US has been actively involved in using its military might to overthrow regimes in Latin America and the Middle East. It has also compromised the sovereignty of innumerable states, by sending killer-drones into their airspace, manipulating their media and funding colour revolutions. 

The NSA is not archiving every bit of digital information it can lay its hands on for no reason. The US seeks global dominance, whether the rest of the globe wants it or not.

The corporate media have been lapping up the CIA’s evidence-free allegations as hungrily as an underfed kitten. Not only have they been credulously regurgitating the dubious claims of the same US intelligence agencies that knowingly spread lies about Iraq’s WMD, but they have added their own dangerous spin to them. 

The media have suddenly woken up to the supposed threat to western democracies posed by “fake news”. The implication is that it was “fake news” that swept Trump to power. A properly informed electorate, on this view, would never have made such a patently ridiculous choice as Trump. Instead, Clinton would have been rightfully crowned president. 

“Fake news”, of course, does not concern the systematic deceptions promoted by the corporate media. It does not include the demonstrable lies – like those Iraqi WMDs – spread by western governments and intelligence agencies through the corporate media. It does not even refer to the press corps’ habitual reports – demonstrating a seemingly gargantuan gullibility – that take at face value the endless state propaganda against Official Enemies, whether Cuba, Venezuela, Libya or Syria. Or Russia and now Trump. 

No, “fake news” is produced only by bloggers and independent websites, and is promoted on social media. Those peddling “fake news” are writers, journalists and activists whose pay packets do not depend on continuing employment by western state-run media like the BBC, billionaire proprietors like Rupert Murdoch, or global corporations like Times-Warner. 

It is worth noting that the leaked Democratic emails, whether the leaking was done by Russia or not, were certainly not “fake news”. They were documented truth. But the leaks are being actively conflated with “fake news”.

The US Aristocracy’s Smear-Russia Campaign: Big Brother at Work. Eric Zeusse, Strategic Culture Foundation. Nov. 28, 2017.

Billionaires, both liberal and conservative ones, own, and their corporations advertise in and their ‘charities’ donate to, America’s mainstream (and also many ‘alternative news’) media. They do this not so as to profit directly from the national ‘news’media (a money-losing business, in itself), but so as to control the ’news’ that the voting public (right and left) are exposed to and thus will accept as being “mainstream” and will reject all else as being “fringe” or even ‘fake news’, even if what’s actually fake is, in fact, the billionaires' own mainstream ’news’, such as their ’news'media had most famously ‘reported’ about ’Saddam’s WMD’ (but the’news’media never changed after that scandal — even after having pumped uncritically that blatant lie to the public).

Have America’s numerous foreign coups and outright military invasions (including Iraq 2003) been the result of fake-news that was published by the mainstream ’news'media, or only by some of the ‘alternative news’ sites that mirror what the mainstream ones have been ‘reporting’ (passing along the Government’s lies just like the mainstream ones do)? 

Obviously, the catastrophic fake news — the fake news that ‘justified’ America’s invading and destroying Iraq, Libya, and many other countries — was all published in the mainstream ’news’media. That’s where to go for the really dangerous lies: it’s the mainstream ’news’media. If those media, and their Government (whose lies they stenographically report to the public) will now censor the Internet, such as is increasingly happening not only in the US but in its allies including the European Union, then the only ‘information’ that the public will have access to, at all, will be the billionaires’ lies. Have we already almost reached 1984, finally, in 2017? 

Two typical examples of this coordinated mass-deception-operation happened to be showing at the top of the magazine-pile at an office recently and struck my attention there, because of the ordinariness of the propaganda that was being pumped. One of them was the cover of TIME magazine, dated “July 24, 2017” and with the cover headlined “RED HANDED: The Russia Scandal Hits Home”, overprinting onto the face of Donald Trump Jr., as their menacing-looking cover-image. That cover-story, as published inside, was titled “How Donald Trump Jr.'s Emails Have Cranked Up the Heat on His Family”, and it used such phrases as “potentially treasonous” and “Russia is the one country that could physically destroy America” (as if it weren’t also the case that US is the one country that could physically destroy Russia, and very much the case also that possession of the weaponry isn’t any indication of being evil, such as this particular propagandist was implicitly assuming). Hillary Clinton’s V.P. running-mate was reported to be “saying that these fresh revelations move the Russia investigation into the realms of 'perjury, false statements and even, potentially, treason.'”

These mere speculations, with slimy inferences of evil, with no real facts that back them up, were the front-cover ‘news’, in TIME. The facts were thin, but the speculations were thick, and the only thing really clear from it was that almost all of America’s billionaires and centi-millionaires want Trump ousted, and want Vice President Mike Pence to become America’s President as soon as possible — before Trump’s term is up. 

Democratic ones certainly do, and many of the Republican ones apparently do as well. Perhaps Trump isn’t hostile enough toward Russia to suit their fancy. At least Pence would be predictable — predictably horrible, in precisely the way that the controllers of the ‘news’media overwhelmingly desire. 

The other example was the cover of The New Republic magazine, dated “December 2017” and it simply headlined in its center, “HOW TO ATTACK A DEMOCRACY”, and the opening page of the article inside was bannered “WEAKEN FROM WITHIN” and below that in the printed edition (the December physical issue of the magazine) was: 

“Russian manipulation of American social media in the 2016 presidential election took the United States by surprise. But Moscow has been honing an information-age art of war — through fake news, disinformation, leaks, and trolling — for more than a decade. How can these societies protect themselves?” 

The online version of that article (which was dated 2 November 2017) opened almost the same: “Moscow has been honing an information age art of war — through fake news, disinformation, leaks, and trolling — for more than a decade. How can free societies protect themselves?” 

The unspoken assumption in this article is that the US CIA hasn’t been doing the same thing — and doing it even worse than the old (and thankfully expired) KGB ever did. (And the CIA, even after the end of communism as its supposed enemy until 1991, still does far worse to other countries than Russia’s FSB does or ever did.) 

Underlying both the TIME article and the TNR article are unstated speculations about the American situation, which are based upon thin facts such as that "at least $100,000 in ads purchased through 470 phony Facebook pages and accounts” were "using Facebook to incite anti-black hatred and anti-Muslim prejudice and fear while provoking extremism”, and that supposedly somehow (they never say how) such puny expenses threw the multi-billion-dollar 2017 US Presidential election to Trump. How is a case such as that, to be viewed by an intelligent reader as constituting anything but propaganda for the weapons-making firms such as Lockheed Martin, who benefit from such international anti-Russia hate-spewing to NATO countries, which are those firms’ major markets (other than Saudi Arabia, and the other fundamentalist-Sunni kingdoms that together constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council or “GCC” nations, which hate Shiite Iran as much as the US regime hates Russia)? 

Also among the underlying and unstated speculations in the background here is the older mass-media allegation about Russia’s allegedly having spied and swayed the US election by ‘hacking’ it, which is likewise being pumped by Democrats and other opponents of Mr. Trump, alleging that ‘Russia hacked the election’. And, so, for an example of the flimsiness of those allegations, one of the two main ‘authorities’ who are the source of that, the Bush and Obama Administration’s James Clapper, was headlined at Politico on 7 July 2017, "Clapper: No evidence others besides Russia hacked US election”. Mr. Clapper happens to be a military-industrial-complex revolving-door ‘intelligence’ ‘professional’ whom, on 10 February 2011, even Politico was reporting to be “backing away from comments he made Thursday calling Egypt's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement 'largely secular’,” and who had also covered-up George W. Bush’s lies about ‘WMD in Iraq’ so as to protect the liars. On 29 October 2003, the New York Times stenographically passed along his deception about the non-existent WMD by headlining, "WEAPONS SEARCH; Iraqis Removed Arms Material, US Aide Says” and reported, "The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material 'unquestionably' had been moved out of Iraq.” No evidence ever existed that Saddam Hussein still had any WMD after the U.N. monitors (UNSCOM) destroyed the last of them in 1998; but Clapper ‘unquestionably’ ‘knew’ to the contrary — though no evidence was ever made available to the contrary of UNSCOM’s reports, and lots of evidence existed that Bush simply lied about the entire matter. 

The other main source for the allegation that ‘Russia hacked the election’ is the Obama Administration’s John Brennan, whom Glenn Greenwald exposed as a fraud back on 7 January 2013, headlining “John Brennan's extremism and dishonesty rewarded with CIA Director nomination”.

Both of the official ‘experts’ who are promoting the Russiagate charges, are longtime, and repeatedly, exposed liars — but that’s the best they can do, always assuming that the public don’t know that these people are propagandists for the military-industrial complex, not real ‘public servants’ at all. 

This isn’t to say that Trump isn’t also a liar — just that the ‘news’ in America is full of conflicting lies — and that they constantly are coming from the fake ‘news’media that are the mainstream ones who are now trying to censor out, and ultimately to obliterate, the few small news-operations (some of which, unlike any of the mainstream ones, actually are good, and authentic journalistic operations, no mere PR hackery) that are constantly exposing the fraudulence of the mainstream ones, which want to impose their dictatorship — the mainstream lies — even more rigorously than they already do. After all, the mainstream Western media still haven’t yet reported US President Obama’s bloody racist-fascist coup that in February 2014 replaced the democratically elected President of Ukraine (and his supporters in the legislature) by a racist-fascist or ideologically nazi regime that’s rabidly hostile toward its neighboring nation of Russia. Even now — nearly four years after the event. It’s already solidly documented history, but the mainstream US-and-allied press still hasn’t reported it. 

The fake-news masters are certainly the mainstream ‘news’media themselves — and they, and the billionaires and centi-millionaires who own and control them, are the real megaphones by which the US dictatorship constantly fools the American people (and the publics in its allied nations), to keep in line, for the aristocracy.

What Now? James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation. Dec. 4, 2017.

“Contact with Russians.” Grown men and women, doubling and re-doubling down on a political fantasy, repeat this prayer hour after hour on the cable channels and Web waves as if trying to exorcise a nation possessed by the unholy hosts of Hell. But such vicars of the news as Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd, and Dean Baquet (of The New York Times) only shove the country closer to a cliff of constitutional crisis. 

To a certain class of people — a class that includes a lot of Intellectuals-Yet-Idiots, as Nassim Taleb has dubbed them — President Donald Trump is a figure of supernatural malignity who must be ousted at all costs. I did not vote for Donald Trump and I do not admire him; but I rather resent the dishonesty that is being marshaled against him, especially the mis-use of judicial procedure and the mendacious propagandizing of the nation in service to that end. 

This is what it comes down to: General Mike Flynn, designated National Security Advisor, conferred with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after the 2016 election about two pressing matters: a vote in the UN orchestrated against Israel, and sanctions imposed against Russia by outgoing President Obama on December 28, two weeks before the inauguration. Both these matters could be viewed as bits of mischief designed deliberately to create foreign policy problems for the incoming administration. 

Flynn’s discussions with Ambassador Kislyak amounted to what are called “back channel talks.” These informal, probing communications occur all the time and everywhere in American foreign policy, especially the transitional months every four or eight years when a new president comes in. They are necessarily secret because they concern issues of high sensitivity. Every incoming presidential staff in my lifetime (going back to Dwight Eisenhower) has conducted back-channel talks with foreign diplomats in order to directly assess where things stand, minus public posturing and bloviating. 

And so that is what Mike Flynn did, as incoming National Security Advisor, after an eight-year run of worsening relations with Russia under Obama that Trump publicly pledged to improve. And now he’s been charged with lying to the FBI about it. Which raises some enormous and troubling questions well beyond the simple charge, questions that suggest a US government at war against itself. 

For instance, why exactly might Mike Flynn lie about his discussions with Kislyak? That ought to be self-evident as per what I said above: back channel talks are necessarily secret. But why not let Vice-president Pence or the FBI in on it? As for Pence, not all government officials are in-the-loop for back channel talks for the excellent reason that the fewer people involved the less chance of the talks becoming un-secret. 

And the FBI? Why, in December of 2016, might Trump and his aides consider the FBI to be an unreliable agency? Because they knew that officials in the FBI under Director James Comey had politicized the agency in favor of his opponent in the election; that the agency had misbehaved in the Clinton e-mail investigation, the meeting at the Phoenix airport between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and the Christopher Steele Russian intel file affair. We don’t know whether, at that point, Trump and his staff knew about the FBI’s conduct in the Uranium One deal. But there was plenty of evidence that the permanent bureaucracy of Washington wanted to use a politicized FBI against Trump in any way that it could to get rid of him. 

And over the weekend, news comes out that Peter Strzok, the top FBI official assigned to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of collusion between Russia and Trump officials, had been removed from the probe after exchanging anti-Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton text messages with his mistress, who was an FBI lawyer working for Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. This information was concealed from the congressional oversight committee that had formally subpoenaed emails from the FBI all year long, only to be stonewalled by the agency. So, now the committee is threatening contempt citations against the current FBI Director, Christopher Fry and Rod Rosenstein, his deputy. 

Why should President Trump not fire Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller now? Mueller was James Comey’s mentor at the FBI when Mueller was director. Is there not a train of association and dishonesty that implicates criminal activity by the FBI itself. And if and when Trump does this, and pardons Mike Flynn for the non-crime of back channel negotiation, should a new special prosecutor be appointed by the Attorney General to investigate the activities of the FBI through 2016 and 2017?

The Scalp-Taking of Gen. Flynn. Robert Parry, Consortium News. Dec. 1, 2017.

What is arguably most disturbing about this case is that then-National Security Adviser Flynn was pushed into a perjury trap by Obama administration holdovers at the Justice Department who concocted an unorthodox legal rationale for subjecting Flynn to an FBI interrogation four days after he took office, testing Flynn’s recollection of the conversations while the FBI agents had transcripts of the calls intercepted by the National Security Agency. 

In other words, the Justice Department wasn’t seeking information about what Flynn said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – the intelligence agencies already had that information. Instead, Flynn was being quizzed on his precise recollection of the conversations and nailed for lying when his recollections deviated from the transcripts.

Accusing Someone You Disagree With Of Being A Russian Troll Is Admitting You Have No Argument. Caitlin Johnstone, Medium. Nov. 27, 2017.

let me explain how normal online discourse operates:

Party A presents a position on an issue.

Party B presents a rebuttal to the position, often supplemented with links substantiating their claim.

Party A returns with their own counter-argument and their own substantiations.

Repeat this back-and-forth for as long as both parties remain interested. 

The civility with which this discourse takes place varies wildly, and it can leave both parties feeling like they wasted an hour or two of their lives talking to a brick wall. But it can also be very informative to people watching, it can often lead to one party realizing that their argument isn’t nearly as strong as their partisan echo chamber had led them to believe it was, and it can cause both parties to do more research and rigorous thinking as they strive to come up with a compelling case. It can even lead to someone realizing that they don’t know nearly as much about a given issue as they thought they did and privately questioning their previous assumptions. 

Conversations like this are socially enriching and lead to a more intelligent and better-informed humanity. 

Compare that to:

Party A presents a position on an issue.

Party B accuses party A of conducting psyops for a foreign government.

Discussion ends. 

These accusations always kill dialogue. And they are meant to. It is a safe way of slamming the door on ideas which make the person who uses this tactic uncomfortable.

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Bottom line: when a stranger on the internet accuses you of being a Kremlin agent, of being a “useful idiot”, of “regurgitating Kremlin talking points”, this is simply their way of informing you that they have no argument for the actual thing that you are saying. If you’re using hard facts to point out the gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative, for example, and all they can do is call your argument Russian propaganda, this means that they have no counter-argument for the hard facts that you are presenting. They are deliberately shutting down the possibility of any dialogue with you because the cognitive dissonance you are causing them is making them uncomfortable.

How Russia-gate Rationalizes Censorship. Joe Lauria, Consortium News. December 4, 2017.

The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept. Dec. 9, 2017.

Third, this type of recklessness and falsity is now a clear and highly disturbing trend – one could say a constant – when it comes to reporting on Trump, Russia and WikiLeaks. I have spent a good part of the last year documenting the extraordinarily numerous, consequential and reckless stories that have been published – and then corrected, rescinded and retracted – by major media outlets when it comes to this story. 

All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes. The Intercept certainly has made our share, as have all outlets. And it’s particularly natural, inevitable, for mistakes to be made on a highly complicated, opaque story like the question of the relationship between Trump and the Russians, and questions relating to how WikiLeaks obtained DNC and Podesta emails. That is all to be expected. 

But what one should expect with journalistic “mistakes” is that they sometimes go in one direction, and other times go in the other direction. That’s exactly what has not happened here. Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump/Russia story and about Russia particularly. At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes. 

No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom. 

So numerous are the false stories about Russia and Trump over the last year that I literally cannot list them all. Just consider the ones from the last week alone...

PCR: Laughing on the way to Armageddon

Laughing on the way to Armageddon. Paul Craig Roberts. Sept. 8, 2017.

The United States shows the world such a ridiculous face that the world laughs at us.

The latest spin on “Russia stole the election” is that Russia used Facebook to influence the election. The NPR women yesterday were breathless about it.

We have been subjected to ten months of propaganda about Trump/Putin election interference and still not a scrap of evidence. It is past time to ask an unasked question: If there were evidence, what is the big deal? All sorts of interest groups try to influence election outcomes including foreign governments. Why is it OK for Israel to influence US elections but not for Russia to do so? Why do you think the armament industry, the energy industry, agribusines, Wall Street and the banks, pharmaceutical companies, etc., etc., supply the huge sum of money to finance election campaigns if their intent is not to infuence the election? Why do editorial boards write editorials endorsing one candidate and damning another if they are not influencing the election?

What is the difference between influencing the election and influencing the government? Washington is full of lobbyists of all descriptions, including lobbyists for foreign governments, working round the clock to influence the US government. It is safe to say that the least represented in the government are the citizens themselves who don’t have any lobbyists working for them.

The orchestrated hysteria over “Russian influence” is even more absurd considering the reason Russia allegedly interfered in the election. Russia favored Trump because he was the peace candidate who promised to reduce the high tensions with Russia created by the Obama regime and its neocon nazis—Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power. What’s wrong with Russia preferring a peace candidate over a war candidate? The American people themselves preferred the peace candidate. So Russia agreed with the electorate.

Those who don’t agree with the electorate are the warmongers—the military/security complex and the neocon nazis. These are democracy’s enemies who are trying to overturn the choice of the American people. It is not Russia that disrespects the choice of the American people; it is the utterly corrupt Democratic National Committee and its divisive Identity Politics, the military/security complex, and the presstitute media who are undermining democracy.

I believe it is time to change the subject. The important question is who is it that is trying so hard to convince Americans that Russian influence prevails over us?

Do the idiots pushing this line realize how impotent this makes an alleged “superpower” look? How can we be the hegemonic power that the Zionist neocons say we are when Russia can decide who is the president of the United States?

The US has a massive spy state that even intercepts the private cell phone conversations of the Chancellor of Germany, but his massive spy organization is unable to produce one scrap of evidence that the Russians conspired with Trump to steal the presidential election from Hillary. When will the imbeciles realize that when they make charges for which no evidence can be produced they make the United States look silly, foolish, incompetent, stupid beyond all belief?

Countries are supposed to be scared of America’s threat that “we will bomb you into the stone age,” but the President of Russia laughs at us. Putin recently described the complete absence of any competence in Washington:

“It is difficult to talk to people who confuse Austria and Australia. But there is nothing we can do about this; this is the level of political culture among the American establishment. As for the American people, America is truly a great nation if the Americans can put up with so many politically uncivilized people in their government.”

These words from Putin were devastating, because the world understands that they are accurate.

Consider the idiot Nikki Haley, appointed by Trump in a fit of mindlessness as US Ambassador to the United Nations. This stupid person is forever shaking her fist at the Russians while mouthing yet another improbable accusation. She might want to read Mario Puzo’s book, The Godfather. Everyone knows the movie, but if memory serves somewhere in the book Puzo reflects on the practice of the irate American motorist who shakes a fist and gives the bird to other drivers. What if the driver receiving the insult is a Mafia capo? Does the idiot shaking his fist know who he is accosting? No. Does the moron know that the result might be a brutal beating or death? No.

Does the imbecile Nikki Haley understand what can be the result of her inability to control herself? No. Every knowledgeable person I know wonders if Trump appointed the imbecile Nikki Haley US ambassador to the world for the purpose of infuriating the Russians.

Ask Napoleon and the German Wehrmacht the consequence of infuriating the Russians.

After 16 years the US “superpower” has been unable to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban, who have no air force, no Panzer divisions, no worldwide intelligence service, and the crazed US government in Washington is courting war with Russia and China and North Korea and Iran.

The American people are clearly out to lunch in their insouciance. Americans are fighting among themselves over “civil war” statues, while “their’ government invites nuclear armageddon.

The United States has an ambassador to the world who shows no signs of intelligence, who behaves as if she is Mike Tyson or Bruce Lee to the 5th power, and who is the total antithesis of a diplomat. What does this tell about the United States?

It reveals that the US is in the Roman collapse stage when the emperor appoints horses to the Senate.

The United States has a horse, an uncivilized horse, as its diplomat to the world. The Congress and executive branch are also full of horses and horse excrement. The US government is completely devoid of intelligence. There is no sign of intelligence anywhere in the U.S. government. Of or morality. As Hugo Chevez said: Satan is there; you can smell the sulphur.

America is a joke with nuclear weapons, the prime danger to life on earth.

How can this danger be corraled?

The American people would have to realize that they are being led to their deaths by the Zionist neocon nazis who, together with the military/security complex and Wall Street, control US foreign policy, by the complicity of Europe and Great Britain desperate to retain their CIA subsidies, and by the harlots that comprise the Western media.

Are Americans capable of comprehending this? Only a few have escaped The Matrix.

The consequence is that America is being locked into conflict with Russia and China. There is no possibility whatsoever of Washington invading either country, much less both, so war would be nuclear.

Do the American people want Washingaton to bring us this result? If not, why are the American people sitting there sucking their thumbs, doing nothing? Why are Europe and Great Britain sitting there permitting the unfolding of nuclear armageddon? Who murdered the peace movement?

The World and the American people need desperately to rein in the warmonger United States, or the world will cease to exist.

An International Court To Preserve Life On Earth needs to be assembled. The US government and the war interests it serves need to be indicted and prosecuted and disarmed before their evil destroys life on earth.

Mike Krieger

Donald Trump Finally Comes Out of the Closet, Michael Krieger, Library BlitzKrieg. Friday Aug 18, 2017

The firing of Steve Bannon is in my opinion the most significant event to happen during the Trump administration thus far. Moreover, it will have massive reverberations across the U.S. political spectrum for years and years to come. I wasn’t planning on writing today, but this news is so incredibly significant I find myself with little choice.

Taking a step back, part of the reason I was immediately able to see through the Trump con was due to my upbringing in New York City. The guy was constantly in the news my entire life, so I had a pretty decent understanding of where he was really coming from and what makes him tick. The mindset of your typical NYC-based billionaire real estate developer is filled with all sorts of perspectives and priorities, but thoughts of populism are not amongst them.

Trump used populism to get elected, and then as soon as he won, immediately appointed some of the most destructive oligarchs imaginable to run his administration. The reason I warned about this incessantly at the time, is because I learned the lesson from the Obama administration. People = policy, and the people Trump was elevating were almost unanimously awful. Irrespective of what you think of Bannon, him being out means Wall Street and the military-industrial complex is now 100% in control of the Trump administration. Prepare for an escalation of imperial war around the world and an expansion of brutal oligarchy.

The removal of Bannon is the end of even a facade of populism. This is now the Goldman Sachs Presidency with a thin-skinned, unthinking authoritarian as a figurehead. Meanwhile, guess who’s still there in addition to the Goldman executives? Weed obsessed, civil asset forfeiture supporting Jefferson Sessions. The Trump administration just bacame ten times more dangerous than it was before. With the coup successful, Trump no longer needs to be impeached.

Here’s another prediction. Watch the corporate media start to lay off Trump a bit more going forward. Rather than hysterically demonize him for every little thing, corporate media will increasingly give him more of the benefit of the doubt. After all, a Presidency run by Goldman Sachs and generals is exactly what they like. Trump finally came out of the closet as the anti-populist oligarch he is, and the results won’t be pretty.

The media took Donald Trump, cut his balls off, and handed them to Goldman Sachs. Mission accomplished. 6:17 AM - 19 Aug 2017

Corporate media got the scalp it wanted, so the hysterical criticisms of him will die down. This is not to say I think the media will become pro-Trump, it just means the obsessive and aggressive propaganda will be dialed back considerably. Trump is now inline, and he will be rewarded by the establishment for that. He will learn that the more he gets with the program, the easier his life will be and the more secure his power. He is merely being conditioned, and my forecast is that Trump will gladly embrace the worst parts of the establishment going forward. Why? Because Trump’s true worldview fits in way more with Goldman Sachs and the military-industrial complex than with populism. It always has. The whole thing was just an act to get elected. Firing Bannon is just Trump coming home to who he always was. A ruthless oligarch.

Now I’m going to make a few predictions about the political environment going forward. First, I think right-populism or the “new right,” is deeply damaged and this presents a huge opportunity for left-leaning populists if they are smart about it. Let’s begin by discussing why this is so problematic for the “new right.”

At this point, something has become undeniable. Trump voters who supported him based on the idea that he would bring forth an agenda of economic populism got played. I understand that many other people just voted for him as a middle finger to the system, but for the true believers who thought he had their backs, it’s now long past the time to pack up your bags. I don’t say this out of pleasure, I genuinely hoped he would push forth an agenda of economic populism, but now we know for certain this is never going to happen. That much is pretty undeniable.

Nevertheless, just because something is undeniable, doesn’t mean it won’t be denied. Too many people have invested way too much in Trump to admit they got played. Sure, there will be outrage for a few days and people will swear to be “off the Trump train,” but as soon as the next wedge social issue gets played up by the media, they’ll be right back onboard. I expect excuses from “new right” leaders to come within a few days, or weeks at the most. Remember, many people built up their entire careers and public profiles by cheerleading Trump into office. Most of these people are egomaniacs. What does an egomaniac do when confronted with information that they got something wrong? Do they publicly admit their error and give credit to those who voiced skepticism, or will they figure out a way to change the subject in order to maintain their relevance and position amongst their fans? I think you know the answer.

As such, right-populism is at a crossroads and this is what I expect to happen. The same people who so passionately convinced people to get on the “Trump train” will be far more concerned with maintaining as much of their social media status as possible, versus doing what’s right for the country. 

There are enough unthinking fans out there to allow this to happen. That said, the movement will be harmed immensely because enough intelligent people will see that many of these new right pundits aren’t who they say they are. The credibility gap will widen and widen, as it should. Trump was a fake and if you were so easily tricked by Trump, why should we trust you on any other subject?

Right-populism is now very much discredited, as its leader has been shown to be nothing more than a narcissistic con-man. This will not be an easy hole to dig out of, yet with some deep reflection, my hope is a new right populism can emerge that is more in tune with Rand Paul than Donald Trump. That’d be nice, but I have my doubts.

As such, an enormous opportunity has opened up for left-leaning economic populism. I already predicted this wave in a piece a few weeks ago titled,Politics of the Next 4 Years – Part 1 (Rise of the ‘DirtbagLeft’). Here’s some of what I wrote:

This faction of leftism is waging war against Clinton neoliberal frauds and Trump’s fake populism at the exact same time. Not an easy thing to do, but I think there’s a huge and growing unsatisfied demand for such a perspective. 

A lot of you will discount the appeal of this movement because many of its most high-profile members are unabashed socialists. This is a big mistake. Remember, Donald Trump won the Presidency not because he was especially great or loved, but because his opponent was terrible, he talked in populist terms, and people just wanted to give a middle finger to the political establishment and corporate media. If that’s right, what’s to stop a movement from winning power if it promises to flip the bird to both Trump and Clinton while also making you laugh? Not much. 

I think the “DirtBag Left” will catch the Trump team completely off guard over the next few years. The reason Trump’s prospects look pretty good right now for a second term is because there’s no real organized opposition to him. By real organized opposition, I mean a movement driven by actual ideas and passion that is also working on a plan to run a competitive candidate in 2020. The current “resistance” consists of Hillary donors, neocons, the corporate media and elements of the deep state. While Trump complains about this opposition constantly, he doesn’t realize how good he has it. The American public hates those factions more than they hate Trump, and nobody wants to vote for that discredited garbage in 2020.

If the genuine left is smart, it will take a step back and see this for the gigantic opening it is. Lots of Trump voters are now up for grabs, and if they can come up with a genuine message of economic populism that avoids the typical leftist pitfalls — such as supporting misguided young people dressing up like ninjas, carrying flags and hurling rocks at people trying to give a talk — the opportunity to create a populist movement of immense national significance is there. People across the country are craving it, but they want nothing to do with antifa, political correctness, or aggression against free speech. Noam Chomsky gets it, and I hope others heed his words.

Noam Chomsky: Antifa is a 'major gift to the Right'

As such, here’s what I would recommend to any burgeoning populist movement wanting to unite the country against oligarchy, as opposed to just becoming a leftist echo chamber. It is the exact same thing I suggested to Trump, but he obviously didn’t listen.

Election 2016 has been extremely bittersweet for me. On the positive side, through both the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump grassroots movements, we have seen clear proof that a huge number of Americans accurately understand that the current system is totally rigged and simply not working for them. These people didn’t migrate toward these two candidates for some tweaks to the system here and there, their supporters want full scale paradigm level change. 

As such, rather than dwelling on the differences between these two populist movements, let’s consider some of the areas where they overlap.

1. Trade — Opposition to NAFTA and current “trade” deals such as TPP, TTIP, and TISA have been central to both the Sanders and Trump campaigns.

2. War and militarism — Whether you believe Trump is sincere or not, opposition to Obama/Clinton interventionist overseas wars were key talking points for both Trump and Sanders.

3. The system is rigged — The painful acknowledgment that the U.S. economic system is a rigged scam that fails to reward hard work, and is more akin to a parasitic, predatory oligarchy with very limited social mobility, has been a key campaign theme for both Trump and Sanders. The economy is increasingly dominated by near-monoploy giants who relentlessly push for more power and more profits irrespective of the cost to society, whether that cost be war, poverty or social unrest. 

4. Money in politics — The rigged economic system described above aggregates wealth into an increasingly small number of hands. Those hands then buy off politicians and rig the political process. A rigged economy and rigged political system perpetually feeds itself and endlessly grows at the expense of the public like a terminal cancer. Both Trump and Sanders emphasized this problem. 

5. Rule of law is dead — Sanders focused on Wall Street bankers, while Trump focused on Hillary and her inner circle of cronies, but the overall point is the same. Rich and powerful oligarchs are above the law. We all know this, but Washington D.C. refuses to do anything about.

Populism isn’t dead in America, but right populism as it exists today is. I just hope the next iteration is a lot more genuine, and a lot more sane.